Netgear R6300 802.11ac Wireless Router Review

Netgear R6300 – Under the Hood

After opening the package we find the Netgear R6300 router which is much
wider than our former king-of-the-router, N900. The dimensions of the
beast are 8.07 in. x 10.04 in. x 3.03 in. and weigh in at 1.44lbs. Along
with the router was an Ethernet cable; quick install guide, and power
adapter. The R6300 features four gigabit Ethernet ports and two USB
ports for attaching wired devices, network storage and printer sharing.
The $200 R6300 also has NetGear genie, secure connection, ready share
USB access, simultaneous dual band, gigabit wired and gigabit Wi-Fi.

The front of the R6300 doesn’t contain any buttons but does have LED
indicator lights. On the bottom of the front, you will see 4 lights for
power, internet connectivity, Wi-Fi status, and USB hub status. The
large “NETGEAR” logo will turn on shortly after the unit boots and is
operating normally.

On the right side, there are two buttons – one for WPS connection to
your wireless clients and the other to toggle Wi-Fi power on and off.

Along the back you can see USB port, 4 Gigabit LAN ports, WAN port, reset button, power toggle button and DC power plug.

We cracked the case to get a better look at what exactly is powering the
R6300. Before we could get to the PCB, we noticed the host of antenna
placed throughout the inside of the case. It looks like the Netgear
engineers wanted to make sure the user had as much coverage as possible
and thus placed antennas “looking” at different angles. We should see
later how this antenna placement affects the R6300’s performance.

Below the two large heatsinks are the brains of the Netgear R6300, Broadcom’s BCM4360 3×3 5G Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac chip with 128 MB of NAND
Flash memory via a Samsung K9F1G08U0D chip. The Broadcom chip is
designed to handle three simultaneous data streams (around 43Mbps) with
QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) 256 giving it a much faster data
rate than that of competitors with only QAM16 or QAM64.